Putting Elders at the Center

We don’t believe that incremental fixes will create the kind of transformational changes we need to create an elder care system that enables elders to age well.

To generate new solutions, we need platforms for experimentation where partners can deeply understand the elder experience and design new solutions is a real world environment.

Experimentation is essential to bringing this vision to life.  Working with a dynamic group of elders who open their lives to us, the BIF team uses an observational and ethnographic approach to understand how elders interact with their environments, utilized shared and private spaces, care for body and mind, and stay connected with their friends and with the world.

From simple things like eating and dressing to the challenges elders often face staying connected to the community, the BIF team has chronicled the current elder experience, using narrative, video and photography to reveal insights into the experience and illuminate opportunities for transformative innovation.

Building on this foundation of experiential learning, we put the elders to work through workshops, focus groups and what we call “deep dive” investigations into focus areas of the experience.

Working with the lab’s team of researchers and designers, elder are empowered to act like design students and examine current aspects of the experience in the context of making it better.

We have done deep dive work in high impact areas like personal care and medication management. Check out the outputs from our recent investigations into medication management.

In this work we challenge elders to share their experience, experiment with new ideas and help us think about a new system that delivers a better experience.

The lab currently includes five major user groups: elders aging in skilled nursing care, elders aging in assisted living environments, elders aging in place, elder caregivers, and baby boomers living independently.

In summer of 2009, Lab expanded to include a virtual component that allows participants to engage remotely, with special focus on baby boomer engagement.

The BIF Elder Experience Lab is ideally suited to test new systems for delivering at-home care and new, collaborative business models for health and wellness services that enable boomers to stay in their homes or in community-based care longer.